Radeon HD 5550 vs Radeon HD 7870

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 7870, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 1000 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a frequency of 1200 MHz on this specific model. It features 1280 SPUs along with 80 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 7870 should theoretically be quite a bit better than the Radeon HD 5550 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		153600 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5550		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 140800 (1100%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 is a lot (more or less 809%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5550. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		80000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		8800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 71200 (809%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7870 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		32000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 27600 (627%)

Please note that the above 'benchmarks' are all just theoretical - the results were calculated based on the card's specifications, and real-world performance may (and probably will) vary at least a bit.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.